North Korea’s Alarmed Neighbors Consider Deploying Deadlier Weapons
"It is possible that North Korea has already achieved the miniaturization of nuclear weapons and has acquired nuclear warheads."
That bleak assessment is likely to feed a growing debate in Japan about whether the country should acquire the means to launch pre-emptive military strikes — attacks that could destroy North Korean missiles on the ground before they are fired at Japan or other targets.
Hideshi Takesada, a specialist on defense issues at the Institute of World Studies at Takushoku University in Tokyo, said
that if South Korea acquired nuclear weapons, Japan might rethink its longstanding aversion to them — despite its traumatic experiences at the end of World War II, when American atomic bombs devastated the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
8, 2017
TOKYO — North Korea’s rapidly advancing nuclear program has prompted politicians in Japan
and South Korea to push for the deployment of more powerful weapons, in what could lead to a regional arms race.
Tokyo said that North Korea’s development of ballistic missiles
and its nuclear program are becoming increasingly real and imminent problems for the Asia-Pacific region including Japan, as well as the rest of the world,
Takesada said that If South Korea went nuclear, that debate would happen in Japan, too,
Even more than Japan, South Korea is working to build its monitoring
and striking abilities, including with radars and remote-controlled reconnaissance planes to track and neutralize North Korean missiles in pre-emptive attacks.
On Monday, South Korea’s conservative opposition group, the Liberty Korea Party, issued a statement favoring
the deployment of American tactical nuclear weapons in the country, the Yonhap news agency reported.
